The price of Bitcoin has doubled in two weeks, now above $16k

The cryptocurrency’s gains Thursday morning hit new heights striking well above $18k across widely varying exchanges, coming to rest above $16,000 while the popular Coinbase exchange had been suffering major issues due to “record high traffic.”

Bitcoin was trading below $8,000 two weeks ago.

This is a truly, truly volatile game at this point, the swings didn’t appear as consequential when the market cap rested in the low billions, but as institutional pocketbooks push that cap to nearly $300 billion, the stakes are raised considerably.

What’s further disturbing is how widely the prices are varying across exchanges, there doesn’t seem to be a stable consensus on where the price is at. It’s always been the case that exchanges differ, but it mattered a lot less when the market cap was hundreds of millions, not hundreds of billions. While Bitcoin prices on Coinbase’s GDAX exchange approached nearly $19,000 (!!!) this morning, others had the price sitting at thousands of dollars less.

The price is currently trading at $15,499 on Bitfinex and $17,639 on GDAX. Coindesk’s Bitcoin price index currently has the cryptocurrency trading around $16,000. These figures have probably swung by several hundred dollars since I typed this sentence.

The fact that even the most established exchanges are having trouble holding consensus on price isn’t great for buyers who can stand to lose (or gain) to exchange volatility on a currency that already has volatility baked into its ethos at this young stage. The arbitrage opportunities appear to be significant here, but the stakes get higher as the market cap shoots through the roof and deep-pocketed institutional investors enter, something has to give.